November 17, 2012
... the perfect gaming chair, converting a Roomba into a security robot, removing a stripped screw with a rubber band, making a radio out of spare parts from your junk drawer, building your own lie detector machine, making a Steampunk Laptop, using the back of your monitor as a desktop, tricking…
November 16, 2012
In a moment of what may have been trance induced ague, my friend John McKay uttered a few words about Twinkies and the Maya that made a certain amount of sense, but something was still missing. But then it hit me like a loaf of bread. Wonderbread. Which, in Afrikaans, means "Miracle Bread" (you…
November 16, 2012
A repost:
In a paper that is about to be published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, researchers Andrew Heymsfield, Patrick Kennedy, Steve Massie, Crl Schmitt, Zhien Wang, Samuel Haimov and Art Rangno make the claim that "The production of holes and channels in altocumulus…
November 16, 2012
Do you know Burn Notice? It is a TV series on USA Network involving a spy, an ex IRA soldier, and a retired Navy Seal who end up working together to solve two problem streams: the ongoing difficulty of why (and how) the main character, Michael, was "burned" as a spy, and the novel problem that…
November 16, 2012
Just in time for Christmas. The problem with cute baby animals born in the zoo is that they grow up. The upside of this process is that you need a NEW Zoo Born every so often, and the new one is out. ZooBorns The Next Generation: Newer, Cuter, More Exotic Animals from the World's Zoos and…
November 16, 2012
Atheist Voices of Minnesota: an Anthology of Personal Stories was released earlier this year. It is chock full of personal stories about the journey from some place to atheism, written by Minnesota authors such as Norman Barrett Wiik, Elizabeth Becker, Kenneth Bellew, Ryan Benson, August Berkshire…
November 16, 2012
The Bird Bloggers, led by Corey Finger at 10,000 birds, where I blog monthly, are asking you to sign this petition and pass it on to others:
We propose a Wildlife Conservation Stamp, comparable to the well-known Duck Stamp, to support the acquisition of habitat and the conservation of all wildlife…
November 15, 2012
For a long time I ignored the White House petitions, mostly, because their sign in system was messing with me and I spend very little time on web sites that mess with me. But they seem to have fixed that problem and now I can actually read what is going on there and participate in the process. Or…
November 15, 2012
So far indeed. It is blobbish and small, but interesting.
From NASA:
PASADENA, Calif. - By combining the power of NASA's Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes and one of nature's own natural "zoom lenses" in space, astronomers have set a new record for finding the most distant galaxy seen in the…
November 15, 2012
The best politically oriented book of the year that I know of is without doubt Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power, by Rachel Maddow. It is a must read and you will love it. A quick description:
"One of my favorite ideas is, never to keep an unnecessary soldier," Thomas Jefferson…
November 15, 2012
I've not been to Maine in years, but there was a time when I frequented the state and knew it pretty well. And, my recollection is that almost everybody there is white or whitish. Hardly any black people. I looked it up just now: Maine is 12th from the bottom among us states in terms of percent "…
November 15, 2012
As you know, it was recently reported that a woman named Savita Halappanavar was killed in an Irish hospital when she was not given proper medical treatment for religious reasons. One of the last conversations she had was with hospital employees who told her and her husband that this was an "Irish…
November 14, 2012
I would almost count it unethical that the New Scientist has a thing that looks like a blog post (an article you can comment on) that has some science in it, but that you have to be a paid subscriber to comment on. WTF New Scientist? What are you trying to pull?
But that's OK, I've got a blog and…
November 14, 2012
How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed is Ray Kurzweil's latest book. You may know of him as the author of The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Kurzweil is a "futurist" and has a reputation as being one of the greatest thinkers of our age, as well as being…
November 14, 2012
The Gender vs. Sex question...referring to the meaning of those two terms in relation to each other...is standard material for discussion in Anthropology and related fields, but is often left unattended to in day to day discourse. Both terms have internal complexity, with Gender meaning something…
November 14, 2012
From the Climate Reality Project
November 14, 2012
I have two questions:
1) Which high power storms had zero extra energy from warming in the atmosphere and seas owing to the release of fossil carbon?
2) Which high powered members of the military, other government units, or industry and business had zero extramarital affairs or the equivalent?…
November 13, 2012
Two items:
1) The recent episode of Skeptically Speaking on space is now a podcast. Details here.
In almost any discussion of space exploration and observation, one question always arises. Why should we spend the money, when there are problems here on Earth? This week, we’re going to tackle this…
November 13, 2012
Several restaurants are laying off employees, needlessly, as a form of passive aggressive snit in objection to Obamacare. They don't want to have to give their employees health insurance. I think some of these companies are also known for having opposed Obama in the election, which is their right…
November 13, 2012
You probably already know that when Obama won the presidency a large number of people, many teenagers, tweeted racist comments about that. Funny story: I found out about the use of the n-word in relation to the re-elected President in one person's tweet, so I figured I'd investigate. I went to…
November 13, 2012
One of the most commonly winged-about facts of Earth's climate change we hear from science denialists is that sea ice in the Antarctic is increasing, therefore, there is no global warming. The fact that every other measurement of temperature and ice-osity indicates warming and melting would make a…
November 13, 2012
If you had a friend or relative who didn't vote at all, and for that reason someone you didn't like got elected, then, naturally, you would run them over. Like this:
Upset over the result of last week's presidential election, an Arizona woman ran over her husband with her car, believing him to be…
November 13, 2012
Three only vaguely connected items that I thought you might want to know about:
From Amanda Marcotte: Skepticon Demonstrates That Pro-Fun Means Anti-Harassment
From Jessica at The Friendly Atheist: Uganda Passes ‘Kill the Gays’ Bill
From Think by Numbers: Government Spends More on Corporate Welfare…
November 13, 2012
Sungudogo, the highly entertaining and exciting adventure novella set in the Central African rain forest, which provides the Skeptics Movement with its own Origin Myth, has been available on the Kindle for a while now, but it is now also available on Smashwords, HERE.
...
Sungudogo is a little…
November 13, 2012
The other side of the coin(age): Newton and the Counterfeiter
Did you know that Isaac Newton had two jobs? One, you know about: To figure out all that physics and math stuff so we could live for a while in a Newtonian world (later to be replaced by an Einsteinian world). The other was as the big…
November 12, 2012
... from you, as a friend or relative? Or, more exactly, what kinds of often well meaning things do you say or do for someone with chronic illness that are actually hurting and not helping?
I have a good friend who, like many other friends actually, has a chronic illness that is sometimes painful…
November 12, 2012
There's been a lot of talk lately about what the Republican party and its members were up to this election year. Racial slurs and lynching chairs, being mean to recent immigrants, and voter suppression directed at minorities could hot have helped to get the non-white vote in line for last Tuesday's…
November 12, 2012
This is the year of the woman in the US Congress and elsewhere, despite the best efforts of some to make sure that the opposite happened.
This is the year in which the Right Wing carried out the most anti-woman campaign ever since suffrage, or at least, so it would appear, along with a continued…
November 12, 2012
Let Them Eat Shrimp: The Tragic Disappearance of the Rainforests of the Sea by Kennedy Warne has been out for about a year, but if you've not seen it you may want to have a look at it. Warne, editor of New Zealand Geographic magazine, is a naturalist who writes about the embattled mangrove swamps…
